1. Andrea Vogt, ‘Widows of Italian suicide victims make protest march against economic strife’, Guardian, 5 May 2012, at: www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/04/widows- italian-businessmen-march
2. Helena Smith, ‘Greek man shoots himself over debts’, Guardian, 5 April 2012, at:
www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/04/greek-man-shoots-himself-debts?
guni=Article:in%20body%20link
3. The original campaign song ‘Anchors Aweigh’ was jettisoned at the last minute at the Democratic convention, after Roosevelt aide Ed Flynn complained that it sounded like ‘a funeral march’ and demanded a ‘peppy’ alternative. See Smith, FDR, p. 268.
4. Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a new science, Penguin/Allen Lane, London, 2005.
5. On the link between ‘authentic’ smiling and self-rated well-being, see P. Ekman, R.
Davidson and W. Friesen, ‘The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain
physiology II’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58:2 (1990), pp. 342–53, at:
http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/publications/1990/the%20duchenne%20smile.pdf 6. Official updates on well-being statistics now feature on the ONS website, at:
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/user-guidance/well-being/index.html
7. On Blackpool's bottom ranking for happiness, see Mark Easton, ‘What are the top five
8. On Gallup's 0–10 scale the overall average score fell from 6.9 to 6.4 between February and November 2008. By January 2009, however, the overall average score was back at 6.9.
9. Layard, Happiness, pp. 49–50.
10. Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, available online at: www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
11. Rather than a 1–10 life satisfaction score, Eurobarometer asks respondents whether they are satisfied with their lives on a four-point scale. In the text we concentrate on the total proportion satisfied, i.e. the proportion ‘very’ or ‘fairly’, as against those who are ‘fairly’
or ‘very’ dissatisfied. For the unemployed, the proportion thus satisfied dips from 80% in May 2007 to 68% at the height of the financial crisis (November 2008), a decline of 12 points. For the employed, the drop-off over these months was just 2 points – from 90% to 88%. See Chaeyoon Lim and James Laurence, ‘Economic hard times and life satisfaction in
the UK and the US’, Institute for Social Change Working Paper 2013–3, Manchester, 2013, at:
www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/socialchange/publications/working/documents/JamesLaurenceHardshipandWell- Being.pdf
12. Between June and November 2011, Eurobarometer shows that the overall average
proportion of all Britons (including pensioners, who are neither working nor workless) who were ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ satisfied dipped from 92% to 87%, very much in line with the trend among the employed. Among the unemployed over these months, the decline was from 79%
to 61%.
13. In the British Eurobarometer data, by July 2009, 91% of working Britons were ‘very’ or
‘fairly’ satisfied, actually higher than the 90% in May 2007. For the unemployed, the July 2009 score was 76%, still 4 points down on May 2007.
14. The precise Gallup question was: ‘Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?’ See Lim and Laurence,
‘Economic hard times’, p. 7.
15. The original Faith Matters survey was conducted in 2006 on behalf of Harvard University by ICR. The original national survey interviewed roughly 3,100 Americans over the phone about religion as well as social/ political engagement. In subsequent waves, in 2007 and 2011, as many of these respondents as possible were re-contacted and re-interviewed
(respectively about two-thirds and one-half of the original total). The original questionnaire can be read online at: http://americangrace.org/RESEARCH/FM2006%20FINAL.pdf For more details, see: Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How religion divides and unites us, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2012, pp. 557–62.
16. Figures from the Faith Matters dataset. See Lim and Laurence, ‘Economic hard times’, p.
13.
17. Claim based on the Faith Matters dataset. See ibid.
18. Full list of controls provided in ibid., p. 18.
19. The British data is presented in ibid., p. 32, Figure 4.
20. Debbie Borie-Holtz, Carl Van Horn and Cliff Zukin, No End in Sight: The agony of prolonged unemployment, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2010, Tables 10–12, at: www.heldrich.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/content/Work_Trends_May_2010_0.pdf 21. Lim and Laurence, ‘Economic hard times’, pp. 17–18; for coefficients see p. 35, Table 1
(Model 1).
22. S. Brown, K. Taylor and S. Wheatley Price, ‘Debt and distress: Evaluating the
psychological cost of credit’, Journal of Economic Psychology, 26:5 (2005), pp. 642–63.
23. Amelia Hill, ‘The hidden poor – in work but sinking, after years without pay rises’,
Guardian, 19 June 2012.
24. Depression defined here on the basis of a Labour Force Survey question about various health conditions, including ‘depression, bad nerves, or anxiety’, which emerges as the condition which most affects approximately 1% of respondents. See D.N.F. Bell and D.G.
Blanchflower, ‘UK unemployment in the Great Recession’, National Institute Economic Review, 214 (2010), pp. R3–R25, esp. pp. R17–R19, Table 15, at:
25. D.N.F. Bell and D.G. Blanchflower, ‘Underemployment in the UK reconsidered’, unpublished Working Paper (March 2013 draft), Table 7. The results are quoted by permission of the authors.
26. ibid., Table 8, reports coefficients for part-timers who want to work full time that vary between 33% and 64% of the coefficient for being unemployed for less than 12 months.
These results are quoted by permission of the authors.
27. The percentage declines in this paragraph are the proportional drop in the coefficients between successive models 1–3 in Table 1 (US) and Table 2 (UK) of Lim and Laurence,
‘Economic hard times’, pp. 18–19.
28. The relevant survey question in the British data is: ‘How well would you say you yourself are managing financially these days? Would you say you are: Living comfortably; Doing alright; Just about getting by; Finding it quite difficult; Finding it very difficult?’
29. YouGov (2013). Summary results and fieldwork details at:
30. Professor Claudia Senik (of the Sorbonne), ‘What makes the French so unhappy?’,
31. The precise question on recession exposure – which admits the four answers that form the categories on the chart – was: ‘Thinking about your life in the last few years: how much, if at all, have you personally been affected by the economic problems in your country in this period?’ The question on anxiety was: ‘Thinking about your life in the last few years, would you say you are more likely or less likely to … feel anxious?’, and the chart records the proportion answering ‘more likely’. YouGov (2013). Summary results and fieldwork details
YouGov on request.
32. Chapter 4 touched on differences in employment protection between France and the UK and the US. To illustrate the difference in the benefit safety net, consider net replacement rates for a single long-term workless individual, who previously earned the median wage, and who does not qualify for in-kind top-ups. In the US, there is no long-term unemployment
compensation – the replacement rate is 0%; meagre UK benefits replace 13% of the lost wage; in France the figure is 22%. OECD figures for 2011, updated March 2013; at:
www.oecd.org/els/benefitsandwagesstatistics.htm Select spreadsheet ‘For long-term unemployed, 2001–2011’.
33. Indeed, the established French tendency to stress the negative in surveys looks to be having a bearing here. Seeing as the French are especially likely to claim to have been hit by
recession, the ‘slump-proof’ French are a highly select group. And yet – perversely – this minority reports more anxiety than their less-select British and American counterparts. This oddity obviously increases the absolute proportion of the French who report rising anxiety in comparison to other countries.
34. Sources and exact question wording given in note 31 above.
35. D. Stuckler, S. Basu, P. Fishback, C. Meissner and M. McKee, ‘Banking crises and mortality during the Great Depression: Evidence from the US urban populations, 1929–
1937’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 66:5 (2012), pp. 410–19, at:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21441177 36. Stuckler and Basu, The Body Economic, p. 86.
37. ibid., pp. 110–11 and Figure 7.1.
38. K. Thomas and D. Gunnell, ‘Suicide in England and Wales 1861–2007: A time-trends analysis’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 39:6 (2010), pp. 1464–75, at:
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/6/1464.full
39. There are certain definitional differences between the two countries. The denominator for both series is total population (all ages). However, in line with national official procedure, the English/Welsh data does not class any deaths of under-15s as intended suicides. Deaths of indeterminate cause that are nowadays officially classified as suicides in the
English/Welsh statistics were unavailable before the 1960s, and so have been excluded throughout. As a result, the numbers here are lower than the contemporary official English suicide rate. The US data covers only ‘Death Registration Districts’, which excluded much of the country in the early twentieth century, but had achieved 95% coverage by 1930. The US data for 1925–98 is published by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) – ‘HIST290:
Death rates for selected causes by 10-year age groups, race, and sex: Death Registration States, 1900–32, and United States, 1933–98’, at:
www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/mortality/hist290.htm For years after 1998, we have used CDC
‘Fatal injury reports, national and regional, 1999–2010’, obtained via CDC's WISQARS database at: www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/index.html For England and Wales, data was collated from official records and kindly supplied by Kyla Thomas at the University of Bristol. More detail on this data is provided in Thomas and Gunnell, ‘Suicide in England and Wales’.
40. ONS, Suicides in the United Kingdom, 2011, at:
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_295718.pdf Unlike other figures referred to, this analysis includes Scotland and Northern Ireland. The downloadable data behind Figure 1 reveals that the total number of suicides rose by 12% between 2007 and 2011, from 5,377 to 6,045.
Age-specific rates rose by 8% for men and 16% for women in this time, although ONS warns that there are some discontinuities over these years.
41. Stuckler and Basu, The Body Economic, p. 12.
42. Ben Barr, David Taylor-Robinson, Alex Scott-Samuel, Martin McKee and David Stuckler,
‘Suicides associated with the 2008–10 economic recession in England: Time trend analysis’, British Medical Journal, 345 (2012), at:
www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/597905/field_highwire_article_pdf/0/bmj.e5142.full.pdf 43. Galbraith, The Great Crash, pp. 148–52.
44. Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, p. xv.
45. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 78.
46. Jahoda et al., Marienthal, pp. 54–6. Note that slightly different categorical schemas are discussed by the researchers over these pages; the 7% we quote in the text is the proportion of families broadly defined as ‘broken’, and as such are an upper bound.
47. The total number of divorces fell from 4,018 in 1928 to 3,563 in 1930, remaining below 4,000 until 1933, when it rose to 4,042. ONS data, collated in ‘Divorce rates data, 1858 to now: How has it changed?’, Guardian Datablog, at:
www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons
48. W. Bradford Wilcox, ‘The Great Recession's silver lining?’, in Wilcox (ed.), The State of Our Unions, 2009, National Marriage Project, University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values, Charlottesville, VA, 2009, p. 16, at:
www.stateofourunions.org/2009/SOOU2009.pdf
49. There are various limitations in the available official data, but we have carried out checks to ensure that this does not distort the trends described. In particular, there was a change in the way the information was collected in 2000, which may introduce some discontinuity.
Coverage of the states in Vital Statistics is incomplete; in recent data California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana and Minnesota are excluded. But nationwide survey-based data suggests a broadly similar overall divorce rate. See Philip N. Cohen, ‘Recession and
divorce in the United States: Economic conditions and the odds of divorce, 2008–2010’, Population Research Center, Baltimore, MD, 2012, at: papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP- MPRC–2012–008/PWP-MPRC–2012–008.pdf Data limitations meant that we had to use divorces per 1,000 of all population to create a long time-series, but divorces per 1,000 married women is arguably more instructive, as it allows for compositional changes (i.e. the declining proportion of married people in the population) which could distort time trends.
Where this alternative measure was available, however, we checked against it, and the choice of denominator made little difference to the short-term movements we describe. The
numbers for 1925–67 are from US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, ‘100 years of marriage and divorce statistics United States’, Data from the National Vital Statistics System, Rockville, MD, 21:24 (1973), Table 1, at:
www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_21/sr21_024.pdf Numbers for 1968–79 are from National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the United States, 1979, vol. 3:
Marriage and Divorce, Public Health Service, Washington, DC, 1984, Table 2.1, at:
www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/mgdv79_3.pdf Numbers for 1980–90 are from: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 43:9 (1995), p. 9.
Numbers for 1990–2000 are collated from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (various years) by Pearson's InfoPlease website. Its summary table is at:
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005044.html For selected years we verified its figures against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports directly. From 2000 onwards, we have provided a summary table produced directly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at: www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm
50. Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, p. 132.
51. The divorce rate (per 1,000 married persons) fell from 12.1 in 2006 to 10.5 in 2009, but then bounced back to 11.1 in 2010. Official data, collated in ‘Divorce rates data, 1858 to now: How has it changed?’, Guardian Datablog.
52. Amelia Hill, ‘Trapped: The former couples who can't afford to move on’, Guardian, 21 November 2012, at: www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/20/trapped-couples-partners- relationships
53. ONS, ‘Divorces in England and Wales – 2011: Statistical bulletin’, 2012, p. 4, at:
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_291750.pdf
54. For black American women the (rounded) decline was from 60% to 28%. All figures from National Marriage Project/University of Virginia/Institute for American Values, The State of Our Unions, 2012, Charlottesville, VA, 2012, p. 65, Figure 2.
55. The Pew Center analysis suggested there had been a relatively modest 7 percentage point drop-off in the marriage rate for college-educated 30-year-olds between 1990 and 2008, but a 15 point drop-off among those of their peers who finished with studying at school. See Richard Fry, The Reversal of the Marriage Gap, Pew Center, Washington, DC, 2010, p. 1, at: www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/11/767-college-marriage-gap.pdf
56. Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, p. 44.
57. ibid., pp. 27–9, 130–3.
58. ‘Changes among the offspring of deprived families are consistently in a conservative direction, towards traditional values and relationships.’ G.H. Elder, Children of the Great Depression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1974, p. 287.
59. Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, pp. 92–115.
60. The new study's emphasis on the variety of families’ response to hardship echoes the work
of Komarovsky and Elder, but in a twist that would not have occurred to Depression-era researchers, the researchers also seek to explain this variation via the ‘DRD2 Taq1A genotype’. See Dohoon Lee, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Sara S. McLanahan, Daniel Notterman and Irwin Garfinkel, ‘The Great Recession, genetic sensitivity, and maternal harsh
parenting’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: Early edition, 2013, at:
www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/07/31/1312398110.full.pdf+html 61. Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, p. 95.
62. Respondents are grouped as ‘slump-proof’ or ‘slump-hit’ on the basis of self-appraisal, as explained earlier. The exact recession question wording and links to the source are given at note 31 above. This chart is based on the proportion answering ‘more likely’ to the
question: ‘Thinking about your life in the last few years, would you say you are more likely or less likely to … argue with family and others?’
63. The researchers establish a double-digit percentage point gap in the likelihood of married and cohabiting couples living stably together until their child reaches the age of five in both countries, but the gap is especially marked in the US. They conclude that in Britain
cohabitation represents a ‘poor man's marriage’, whereas in the US cohabiting unions are unstable as well as disadvantaged. See Kathleen Kiernan, Sara McLanahan, John Holmes and Melanie Wright, ‘Fragile families in the US and UK’, Bendheim Thomas Center for Research on Child Well-Being Working Paper WP11–04-FF, Princeton, NJ, 2011, at:
64. Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family, pp. 123–4.